Fight To Limit Development Is Gaining Ground

Taxpayers Voting For Open Space

After a Village Board meeting in Ringwood in McHenry County a couple of years ago, an elderly farmer in the audience surrendered to his seething discontent.

He had hoped that development--assuming he could sell his land at the right price--would be the payoff for his decades of toil. And here were these new village trustees, making plans to restrict growth.

The Village Board adjourned, and the old man rose. He made his way to the front; then he tried to punch Village President Rick Mack.

This business of curbing development is a messy, tangled one. But advocates are waging the fight vigorously, and they say they are gaining unparalleled momentum in one arena: public, taxpayer-financed acquisition of land for open space.

Despite critics who contend there are better ways to preserve land, the past couple of years in the Chicago region and throughout the nation have yielded historic gains for open-space referendums. Nationally and locally, taxpayers are more willing to fork over money to stop development. A few recent examples:

- DuPage County voters in November 1997 approved a proposal allowing the Forest Preserve District to spend $75 million of taxpayers' money to buy about 2,300 acres, which would raise taxes on a $200,000 home by about $21 a year.

- The McHenry County Conservation District in June approved $18 million to buy about 1,500 acres over the next three years. That decision came after the district spent about $4 million earlier in the year to buy nearly 240 acres of open land.

- In Will County, nearly 60 percent of Homer Township voters in November backed a ballot measure calling for the township to buy 300 acres for $8 million. And surveys indicate 63 percent of registered voters in Will support a Forest Preserve District proposal on the ballot April 13 that will ask taxpayers for $70 million to buy about 6,500 acres for open space and to restore natural areas in 17 preserves. The owner of a house assessed at $100,000 would face a tax increase of about $2.45, officials say.

- Surveys show that 65 percent of voters would support the Kane County Forest Preserve District's $70 million land purchase plan, even though each of those voters would pay $1.70 more in taxes a month for the extra green acres. Buoyed by those polls, forest preserve commissioners voted unanimously last week to put the issue on the April ballot.

- Voters throughout Lake County will be asked in April to approve a $55 million bond issue, which would add $14.22 a year to the tax bill of the owner of a home valued at $150,000, to expand and improve the forest preserves.

Meanwhile, Libertyville Township in Lake County will ask voters in February to approve a $35 million land acquisition plan.

At the national and state level, President Clinton included $1 billion for land purchases in his 2000 budget proposal, and Gov. George Ryan pledges to spend up to $40 million a year to acquire open land in Illinois.

"People are fed up," said Brook McDonald, executive director of the Conservation Foundation, a private, non-profit land preservation group based in Naperville. "Open space literally is being converted overnight to subdivisions and strip malls. I must get two or three calls a week from people who want some help fighting a development."

Nationally, voters approved a record $7 billion in new funding for land acquisition last year, according to the Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco-based national non-profit land conservation group. That figure was up from the 1996 record of more than $4 billion.

In addition, the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center of the Midwest reported that voters last year supported 127 of 150 anti-sprawl measures on ballots across the country.

"The groundswell at the ballot box to preserve open space is largely a reaction to the threat that open space is vanishing before our eyes," said Mike Truppa, policy specialist at the center. "It doesn't really reflect a change in attitude. It reflects an awakening to the fact that the very natural amenities that we've always embraced are in danger of disappearing."

Figures from the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission show that from 1970 to 1990, the population of the six-county Chicago metropolitan region grew by 4 percent. During that time, the amount of land for housing grew by 46 percent and for commercial development by 74 percent.

"I'm not sure there's an empirical way of quantifying the amount of open space a region needs," Truppa said. "But clearly, any region that aspires to be competitive economically needs an ample supply of open space and natural areas. Those are amenities that make a place very livable, and in order to be economically vibrant, a community needs to be livable."